Tuesday, May 21, 2013

By the Fourth night of Continuum's Live Art Series, it was
very clear to me that these shows don't have a theme. There is a show. There
are artists. Performances happen. Nonetheless, themes emerge if for no other
reason than we are pattern recognition machines eager to find rhythm and
commonality in even the most random phenomena. In CLAS 4, I found the theme to
be physical minimalism, a "muscle dance" if you will, a term which I
gleefully and un-apologetically stole from Ms. Y.E. Torres. A majority
of the performances seemed to be devoid of narrative drama, but replete
with physical tension.

As is my habit, I was running a little late and I literally
stepped into the evening's opening performance, In
Remembrance of Me by Joshua
Yates. He was quietly kneeling in the center of six concentric
circles of broken (one could say disassembled) cinder blocks. He continued to
meditate\pray while I jockeyed for a position upstairs at Avant Garden.

Without saying a word, Yates picked up a cinder block. He
held it close to his face, close enough to smell, close enough to kiss and
mouth words to it. Perhaps blessing. Perhaps cursing. Perhaps comforting.
Perhaps scolding. Then he placed the fragment in a white nylon
bag, re-positioned his body every so slightly in a
counter-clockwise direction to toward the next fragment. Repeated the ritual.
He performed the same process for each rock in the circle.

Joshua Yates amid the 6 rings of disassembled cinder
blocks

Sniff? Lick? Kiss?
Bless?
Once he'd gathered all the rocks in the circle into the bag,
he stood up, twisted the top of the bag closed, and then thrust it over his
head. He held it for 15 may be 20 seconds.

Then he knelt in the center of the circle and repeated the process.
With each circle, the fragments increased in size and the bag grew
substantially heavier. At first, what was trivial--the hoisting of the bag and
holding it up to the light--became non-trivial, became challenging.

A feat of effortless ritual became a feat of physical
strength and endurance. The offering was uncertain. The tension was palpable.
Would he lift it? Drop it? Fall? Collapse.

Holding 5 rings of cinder block
overhead

Attempting to hoist all 6 rings of
cinder block

After the final circle of fragments had been gathered and
the bag was secured closed, Yates struggled to lift the bundle.

Sweat beaded on his face. He breathed deeply, heavily,
grunted, dropped the bag heavily. A small cloud of cinder block dust exploded
from the bag. Redoubling his effort, he crouched deeper, struggled vigorously,
and dropped it again. He tried a few more times, failing each time and then
walked off leaving the bag in the middle of the stage.

The end
of Remembrance of Me

At the conclusion of Yates piece, we filed past the bag of
cinder blocks and up the stair to the attic to observe Manola Maldonado's
performance, Tea Party. In the darkened attic,
Maldonado stood dressed in a frilly short dress holding a green ball over head
with unwound magnetic tape attached to her and still connected to their
cassettes. She lowered the ball and walked in a small circle dragging the tapes
behind her. Then she sat on a blanket among strawberry short cakes, tea, and
dolls. La-la singing, she goes through the motions of hosting a tea party and
then she dumps powdered sugar over everything.

Manola being mother at
tea time

The dim lighting, the cramped setting, the props, the
costuming gave the piece a hallucinatory Alice-and-Wonderland feel, which was
obviously intentional. Where the piece lost me was in the connections among the
magnetic tape beginning, the tea party middle, and the powdered sugar
end.

powdered sugar makes
everything better

My small mind was unable to connect them in any other way
than slightly surreal blend. And may be that's as far as I was supposed
to.

Into the light and back to the second floor, we went. Jade
performed Questions of a Victim. It began with her crouched
on the floor in the manner of a child, writing. After a minute or two of
intense scribbling, she approached the audience and asked, "Why are they
so mean?" Not indicating who they were and thus leaving us to ponder if we
were "they" or she was they or they were "they" as we all
self-righteously suspected of everyone else but of course we.

She then put on a black shirt and approached the audience
again. "Why won't they leave me alone? Shut up!"

Jade

Next she donned a white shirt and started singing quietly
John Lennon's "Imagine". "Imagine all the people..." and
then wordlessly hummed the melody.

Jade donning a white
shirt,
transforming into OK

Until she stopped and then half-shouted, "Don't let
anyone bring you down. Look at me, I turned out OK." Finally, she laughed
in a manner that indicated that her character was anything but OK. But, we
already knew that and turned away as was expected.

Next up was Jonatan Lopez
performing My Filthy Self. Dressed in sunglass, a
white t-shirt, and jeans, he started out strutting down the middle of the room
(think Tom Cruise in Risky Business) on an improvised paper
runway.

Shame Swagger or
Shame Strut?

kneeling...but not in
prayer

At the end of the runway were two jars of paint: one with
red paint and one with black. He knelt between the jars, removed his sunglasses
and t-shirt, neatly placed them on the paper, and painted his mouth
black.

Next, Lopez removed his pants and lay them out to form a
silhouette of a body.

Then he took the black paint brush and began to paint his
genitals: black dick, black ball sack.

Once you paint it
black...
Lopez took his time. Meticulous and thorough, he obviously wanted
to give the audience time to observe and reflect.

Black dicked and black balled (I can't help of thinking of
Al Jolson...Jade's performance in CLAS 2), he then grabbed the jar of red
paint and attempted to pour it on his ass. I'm assuming he was aiming for his
asshole (and all the weighted metaphors that it carries).

Lopez then proceeded to pour the red paint on the clothing
silhouette at the crotch and near the heart and neck.

Once he'd stained red himself and the clothing to his
satisfaction, he picked up a sign board that read "Take my picture"
and hung it from his neck with a cord. The board had a hole at crotch level and
he stuck his black dick and balls through the hole.

Finally, he circumnavigated the room so that anyone wanting
to photograph his filthy self could.
I'm not a psychologist or a psychotherapist, but I don't
think that you needed to be to understand this piece. At least symbolically for
this performance, it was safe to assume that Black = bad, Red = Blood (and not
in a good way), genitalia = self. Lopez showed his shame, so to speak, and the
act played our as cathartic for the artist but it was
not transferable, at least not for me. His shame was not my shame. (And
I've got plenty of shame.) The piece didn't draw me into it to share in his
shame or its absolution. It simply showed it to me and gave me and the rest of
the audience the opportunity to Instagram it.

As if on cue, Jana Whatley appeared in a black top and black
tights and performed Steps through the remnants of
Lopez's performance. It consisted of her walking backward in progression of two
steps backward, one step forward. It was subtle, quiet, consistent, almost
comic in its physical simplicity. In contrast to Lopez's performance, the
minimalism served as a palette cleanser.

Whatley walked the second floor, two step backwards and one
step forward, and then proceeded downstairs past Koomah performing his
durational piece, Waiting. Koomah stood in a
full length sleeveless black dress and black veil. Noiseless and still.
Audience members late to the show walked past him one by one with the same
apprehension that you have in a haunted house, anticipating something and yet
not knowing exactly what or when. Their individual but similar reactions
amusingly hypnotized me.

Koomah
Waiting

"Hello?..." David Collins voice broke Koomah's spell.
He stumbled into the performance space wearing bubble wrap and a grimace and
nothing else. Then fell to the floor and began rolling around, possibly
flailing, but it's hard to flail freely when encased in bubble wrap. His hand,
holding a cell phone, was wrapped to his ear. As he continued to talk to the
phone, it became clear that he had called a suicide prevention/crisis
hotline.

It's a bird, it's a
plane...

It's David Collins in the latest in
bubble wrap fashion

Through a humorous monologue we learned that his
character

is 50

is depressed

is incompetent at suicide (plenty of kerosene but
no match)

quit his lucrative job (would rather die than work
for Chevron)

is depressed by his mortality and it's possibly
killing him

is currently doing a performance art
piece

is indignant that his councilor is in Bangalore
and that his existential crisis has been outsourced
lives in a commune, and

concludes that he should talk to people and may be
they could help (as opposed to a call center worker who would probably prefer
to diagnose his printer error but didn't make a high enough score on that test
to work for that company).

Then Collins took his own advice and he talked to the crowd
asking them to strip him naked and pop the bubbles.

Note to self: dress in bubble wrap
if you want beautiful people to strip you
naked.

And they did. I'm not sure they found meaning in the act,
but they got to bare skin.

Once Collins had been stripped and all his bubbles popped,
Koomah placed a chair in the middle of the room and Jonatan Lopez sat in it. In
this piece called Transference, Lopez sat and thought of a
painful memory. Hopefully, it was the one that inspired him to paint his dick
black in My Filthy Self because I don't think he's done
working through that stuff. Koomah then knelt behind Lopez for about a minute.
Then Koomah moved in front of Lopez, reached out and touched his face.

With his eyes closed, Koomah then tilted his face towards
Lopez's and breathed deeply until he suddenly let go and walked away.

And here I felt like yelling "Out
demon! Out!"

As you might have gathered from my photo captions, I
understood the concept but I didn't feel it. To be fair to Koomah, I've been to
waaaaayyyyy too many charismatic church services (I call them "freak out
for Jesus" sessions) for this subtle form of transference to have an
effect on me. I also don't know if it worked for Lopez or even if it was supposed
to or what that would have looked like. The audience, however, seemed accepting
of the ambiguity.

Jonatan moved himself and the chair out of the performance
area and then Sway
Youngston unceremoniously dumped three bags of leaves on the floor.
She did it with impunity and she could because they were locally sourced from
the Montrose, the Heights, and a communal living space entitled Urth
House.

Sway laying down the
leaves

She then cleared a circular space in the middle of
the pile and began her piece entitled, What's
Left? She then arranged on the floor a bunch of clay spirit
animals that audience members had been invited to make when they entered the
bar.

Clearing a space

She plucked one up and asked "Whose spirit animal is
this?" A man claimed it and she asked him to come into the circle. She lay
on her back, placed a 2' x 2' plywood square on her torso, placed the spirit
animal on the square, and instructed him to smash his spirit animal with a
plastic hammer. He did. First with a tentative swing, then with a more forceful
one.

Caution: Spirit animal slayer at
work

Youngston repeated this process with several more spirit
animals and their creators until there was a sizable lump of clay on the
board.

Spirit crushing spans
genders.

Then she gathered the clay from the board on stomach, and
molded it to her face until it was completely covered. Breathing heavily, she
searched for the hammer with her hands. After she found it, she struck her
belly, hard. Once. Twice. Five times.

Sway covered in spirit animal remains

Next, she took the handle of the hammer and inserted it into
her mouth. (I'm hesitant to use a religious or politically biased description
here, but if I use a pornographic one, # 1. One will comment about it and # 2.
Everyone will know exactly what I'm talking about.) Basically, she
deep-throated the hammer handle and held it there for half a minute or a full
minute. Finally, she turned to the side and spit it out.

Sway swallowing
the spirit animal slayer

What's left but to interpret the piece as one about spirit
crushing. And not the corporate/geo-political/material world (a favorite
scapegoat in a culture that simultaneously insists on personal autonomy)
crushing our spirit, but we (I'll join the audience for this one) volunteering
to and then gleefully or at least willingly crushing our own spirits. At the
end, I was uneasy with the piece but not sure why. Was it a little too easy or
a little too close to home?

At that point, it was intermission and with all the shame
and spirit crushing that I'd endured, I needed a drink to lift my spirits. I
headed down to the bar and almost walked into the arms of Shanon
Adams performing one of the durational pieces. I'll
christen it Ballet d' Ugs, because I lack imagination and
she was wearing Ug boots as she proceeded to dance through out the bar.

Ninja? No. Shanon
Adams

Adams moved through the bar gracefully. Her movements were
deliberate, hinting at an overall choreography.

Nevertheless, she flowed around drunk patrons and unbalanced
art reviewers with too much equipment as if our movements had been anticipated
and incorporated into the piece.

In bars, I often stumble upon people, but never so
gracefully. I'm guessing some of my fellow patrons there for a drink instead of
the performance art had the same experience.

Another durational performance that I encountered during the
intermission was Neil
Ellis Orts' Tell Me Where It Hurts.
Dressed in a blue Lycra body suit complete with hood and mask, he approached
bar patrons and audience members with a sharpee and invited them to "map
their pain." He instructed me to locate the place on his body that
corresponded to a place on my body where I experienced pain, circle the area,
and then to rate the pain on a scale of 1 to 10.

Neal selling Pain
Mapping

The piece was inspired by a story he heard on NPR about a
woman who told people about her cancer. This process attempted to take this
communication one step further, to physically map it, to make it that much more
real.

Pain Mapping was very
popular.

While I mapped my pain, two audience member were recruited
to duct tape the stairs. Not completely, but enough. One drew a yellow line of
duct tape up the stairs and another drew a pink line. Neither were told the
purpose of their tape lines. Then the artist Hilary
Scullane attempted to navigate the stairs with her hands in constant
contact with the yellow line, her feet with the pink one.

Duct tape guide
lines

Scullane began at the bottom of the stairs and worked her
way up. Avant Garden being Avant Garden, she had to navigate around the bar
patrons who either didn't know she was performing or didn't care.

In Scullane's orchestration, the act of "walking the
tape" becomes acrobatic and gymnastic.

Like Yates' piece, and Whatley's, it is minimal,
non-narrative.

And yet, it is also extremely evocative because at the end,
you don't just understand the piece, you can directly relate to it, and feel
it.

Next, I got nailed by Nikki Thornton performing her piece,
Nail Me. In this performance, Nikki donned a nail spiked
bikini top and shorts and then shook, shimmied, and scraped along the wall,
along the stair banister, against the mirror...

Nikki Thornton and her
doppelganger (
photo by Hilary Scullane)

...the bar, and the patrons, of which I was one. The visual and
tactile aspects of the piece were obvious and a little scary to some of the
non-audience bar patrons. I saw at least one guy take a very big, intentional
step away from Nikki as she slither-scraped from the stairs.

The piece also had a subtle aural component that
was barely audible. However, if you concentrated, or were near enough
to participate in it, you could hear the nails on glass, on wood, and on
fabric.
Having been nailed, it was time head up stairs for the final
series of performance. The first one was an untitled piece by David
Graeve. It started with him standing in the middle of the floor
facing a woman. They were holding hands and wearing safety goggles and
protective ear muffs. Between them was a large red plastic balloon/sack. A
third person flipped on an electric pump and the balloon began to
inflate.

Performance art
foreplay

As the balloon began to inflate it pushed the two artists
apart. They struggled to move closer.

They struggled to embrace. Sometimes enveloped in the red
plastic. Sometimes suspended by it appearing to ride it, appearing to hump
it.

The success of their endeavor played out in cycles at times
their mouths, their bodies were inches apart. At other times, they struggled to
hold on to each other and you had a sense that one might lose its grip and
going flying into the audience.

Ultimately the piece came to an end. (whether because of a
Continuum-based time limit or per Graeve, it wasn't clear.) They wrestled to a
stalemate without a climatic embrace or disbursing or casting away.

The metaphor for relationships seemed obvious enough, but
how one interpreted the metaphor was another matter. Other than being a generic
symbol for a divisive entity, what did the plastic red balloon represent?
Society? Household debt/financial ruin (being in the red)? The role of
petrochemical byproducts (it was plastic and this is Houston) in the
relationship/bedroom? (I'm leaving you for my vibrator. It doesn't whine as
much and it makes more money.) A red herring, literally (dietary restrictions
drive us apart) and metaphorically? An over inflated concept of love? A red
sports car?

I'm not sure, and I'm not sure if Graeve intended for the
audience to determine that with any certainty. Regardless, participating in the
performance and making it work, like a relationship, looked exhausting.

Y.E.
Torres was next with Muscle Dance. I first
encountered Torres at a belly dancing performance. So, mentally (that is
because I have a small rather intransigent mind) I classify her as a belly
dancer which is limiting in all the wrong stereotypical ways.

First of all, she doesn't have a belly. Second, although she
incorporates belly dancing moves, along with classical ballet and modern dance
moves, in her performances in a way that ballet and modern dancers don't, her
performance lies outside the genre of belly dancing.

Third, she choreographs her pieces to non-traditional belly
dancing music.

Like all dance-centric performances, it's just something you
have to experience. (Unfortunately, I can't find a video of it I can
share.)

Shifting from non-verbal, elegiac to the prosaic,
Julia
Claire Wallace took the stage and announced that she wanted a
revolution. She signaled to the audience to gather around her in her kindly,
unassuming Mr. Roger's style. We flocked around her like obedient school
children. "I want a revolution." She declared and they echoed.
"Say it like you mean it." They repeated it louder because bigger is
better and louder passes for conviction. (This is Texas after all). A woman,
Kira, began to drum on a table. Lead by Wallace, we chanted/sang "I want
change." The performance morphed into a spontaneous revolution song that
built and then ended. Was that it? Was that revolutionary to you? Apparently,
in Ms. Wallace's neighborhood it was.

Julie Claire Wallace, the
"Mr. Rogers" of Houston performance
art

Wallace again...I meant to photograph the drummer, but revolutions are not conducive to photography.

In the final act of the evening, Jajah Gray
took the floor and made a makeshift alter. It consisted of cards, books, three
glasses of water, cloths (scarfs/shawls/do rags/bandannas).

Jajah making an
altar

He asked the audience "Can you imagine a world so clean
and pure?"
He then emptied his pockets of money. Coins spilled on to
the floor, bounced, rolled. Gray stomped a beat with his feet. The audience picked it
up.

Gray performed and held a yoga bridge until I thought he'd
collapse. Instead, he began dancing and vaulting over the altar. After a few
passes, he partially deconstructed the altar and offered parts to the audience
while singing query, "Can you imagine a world so clean and pure?" The
audience joined in. A dog, that had been silently present for all the
performances, suddenly barked. Gray started the crowd foot stomping and then began
singing, in what I don't think was English. (But it was late, I'd had a few
drinks, and had been nailed, so I'm not testifying to any of this.)

Gray drank from 1 of the 3 glasses of water, shouted, and
then the performance ended.

Jajah
ends

To me, Grays performances, similar to Y.E. Torres, are
lyrical and mystical. The intention was not always clear and segments didn't
always cohere but there was the physicality of them and the oblique content
created ample space for me to get comfortable in them.

Julie Claire Wallace in
Dirt Massage
After standing for 4+ hours, I could have used a massage.
Nevertheless, she wasn't giving she was receiving. The handwritten sign by her
side read, "I truly need a massage."

Hilary Scullane fulfilling wishes
Wallace provided the dirt and the massage oil. The audience
was expected to provide the labor. A couple of Continuum members applied oil
liberally and pressed and pushed the dirt into Wallace's back, shoulders, arms,
legs.

I took a turn making mud pies on Wallace's back and
then kneading, rubbing, and pressing it into her flesh.

Relaxing for her. Raw, minimal, perhaps even infantile for
us. And yet, satisfying in the way that the most successful performances of the
evening were. Minimal and primal and direct.

11 comments:

I don't dislike performance art when it is good, but reading these summaries only leaves me hoping that these guys will take a good look at the history of performance art and learn and grow from it. This is so dated and nothing.

Hi Anonymous internet user. We are not trying to come up with something that no one has done before, nor trying to imitate the past. We are simply making art that flows out of our hearts and personal struggles, which reflects present issues of our generation. We don't aim to entertain anyone, there is theater for that. Some audiences really enjoy our work, and some do not, but that is perfectly ok.

We are happy to provide an environment in which young artists can share their work and evolve, and these artists deserve constructive criticism and encouraging feedback. We are very thankful to Dean Liscum for providing a glimpse of how the audience perceives our work, but that is only relevant to a few of our artists.

Thanks for stopping by. Feel free to contact us if you wish to have an elaborate discussion about performance art, or show us what you got by performing at one of our shows.

oh and little advice, releasing negative energy out into the universe will only bring negative back.

Spot on, Jonatan. I'll be the first to admit I do performance art for completely selfish reasons. It is a way for me to explore the intricacies of my psyche and my relationship with energies, people, and my fears. Like it or not, I'll continue in my own vein.

Same here, was bored and said "ball sack" to Google to see what would be the most random pick it'd bring up. Well it brought me to the most self-indulgent and lame-ass fake art crap I've ever seen. Performance art is one thing, but this... Must have been the most painfully boring evening ever. Plus reading comments such as "I do performance art for completely selfish reasons. It is a way for me to explore the intricacies of my psyche and my relationship with energies, people, and my fears." speaks volumes about the crowd attending and performing. It's in times like these that I enjoy my free will the most and enjoy the luxury of being called a philistine by scam artists and loons that think they reinvented art by just shitting in public (figuratively or literally). Don't mean to rain on your parade but I'm just fed up of people's tripe. Tired of seeing that the emperor is naked and shutting up for fear of being called an ignorant. After a boring read about boring installations I can definitely say that this event was as creative and spiritually evolved as my dick in a box.

Hey, you're welcome not to like it, but calling these performers scam artists is absurd. Do you think they're getting rich from doing this? Or getting paid at all? Look, there are lots of forms of entertainment that I feel are valueless (professional football, for example), but I don't think that the players are "scam artists."

Part of me is wondering why you care so much. No one made you go see these performances and no one made you read this post. Unlike many other forms of entertainment/art/information, these performances are not shoved in your face. Quite the contrary, you really have to seek them out if you're interested in this kind of thing. Only by a bizarre bit of search engine insanity did you end up here. And even then, you could have stopped reading after two seconds. But you didn't. Thanks for reading and your excellent and brave comment, "anonymous."